United States

Situated about 80% of the way down between San Francisco and San Jose, and in the heart of the world's first and biggest (and only true) Silicon Valley, Sunnyvale is a suburban sleepytown filled with some of the most hi-tech corporate head offices on the planet. I spent several days down here, for the OSCMS Summit 2007 (of which DrupalCon was a big part), which was hosted at the massive campus that is the Yahoo! world headquarters.

Well, OSCMS 2007 has now finished, and it was an absolute blast. PHP kicked ass, Drupal kicked ass, and Open Source in general (and its grand plans for world domination... bwahahaha) kicked ass. In case any of you have missed these, here is: a link to my slides from my presentation on site structuring and navigation in Drupal; as well as links to some collections of resources from the summit.

Spent all day today down at the Sunnyvale Sheraton, where the Drupal folks managed to hire out a big room, and to fill it with an abundance of Wi-fi, coffee, and donuts. So that we could conduct the Drupal Hackfest. The day was a great success, with close to 100 developers churning away code throughout the room, and working through the core issue queue, and with three core committers present to help get those patches in once and for all, by making core CVS commits.

More of the same, really, except that some of it I did myself. After the big night out and the motel room crash last night, I was feeling pretty wasted; but I managed to get through the day, and to pull off my presentation reasonably well.

After Day 1 of DrupalCon finished, we all went down to the Sunnyvale Sheraton for some drinks and mingling, and then we continued on to the Firehouse bar-slash-restaurant for more of the same. By the time we were done drinking and mingling, I'd missed the last Caltrain back to San Francisco. Luckily, the very kind and magnanimous Bill Fitzgerald let me crash on his motel room couch for the night. So I spent one night in Sunnyvale itself!

Walking into DrupalCon felt — for a die-hard fan like myself, at least — like walking into the cast of my favourite movie of all time. All these people whose avatar photos I've seen, whose blogs I've read, whose patches I've reviewed, whose criticism I've received, and whose IRC handles I've chatted with (all for the past 2 years) — all of them suddenly, in a very surreal way, came to life before my very eyes. So I finally have proof that this whole Drupal thing is not a great big online hoax: as I always believed, other Drupal people do actually exist in real life!

The first day of my first-ever DrupalCon was very full-on. Jam-packed with meeting famous people, having heated discussions, and attending a plethora of sessions. It felt absolutely gawddamn amazing to finally make it to one of these things. Read on for my shpiel on the various sessions that I attended today, and on what happened at them.

Got up at 6am this morning, in order to catch a bus, then a train, then a light-rail, to the OSCMS Summit 2007 down in Sunnyvale. The train was the biggest part of the trip (1 hour). the Bay Area's Caltrain is a pretty cool service: high-speed and cheap trains that go everywhere between San Francisco and San José, plus they have bike racks on the trains. The other two legs of my journey — the Muni cable-car bus in San Francisco, and the VTA Light Rail in Sunnyvale — were good fun as well.